Quotes About Society

anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

However, we must not forget that it will be some twenty years before the ordinary run of people begin to think the thoughts of the educated person of today.

O excesso de animalidade deforma o homem cultural; o excesso de cultura cria animais doentes. Este dilema mostra toda a insegurança que o erotismo traz ao homem. No fundo, é algo muito poderoso que, como a natureza, pode ser dominado e usado, como se fosse impotente. Mas o triunfo sobre a natureza se paga muito caro. A natureza dispensa quaisquer declarações de princípios, contenta-se com tolerância e sábias medidas.

The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes.

the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real-life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality

Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.

As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead "abnormal" lives.

If I can demonstrate to a madman that his ideas do not lie beyond the sphere of the human mind, he will still feel part of human society, and there is still hope. As long as you can make yourself understood to one single person, you are not yet mad. And even if you find no such person, you should consult some old books, and perhaps there you will find something that seems familiar to you. Only when you can no longer make yourself understood will you be mad and excluded.

Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass. ... Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic - that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from the outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.

the energy of violence moves through our culture. Some experience it as a light but unpleasant breeze, easy to tolerate. Others are destroyed by it, as if by a hurricane. But nobody—nobody—is untouched

While we are quick to judge the human rights record of every other country on earth, it is we civilized Americans whose murder rate is ten times that of other Western nations, we civilized Americans who kill women and children with the most alarming frequency. In

If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intra-species violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it. We'd view it as a great perversion of natural law—but we wouldn't deny it.

Ernest Becker writes, "The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society." Well

multiple-murderer Jack Henry Abbott's book In The Belly of the Beast.

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

The whole damn thing started when they gave women the vote.

One is in the cultural taboo against rounded bellies. Fashion dictates that both men and women must have flat bellies. The gaunt fashion-model look still has power over certain segments of the population, as does the ramrod-straight military-inspired look for men.

Si nuestra sociedad tuviera la oportunidad de ser voyeur por un día, abordaría la vida de manera muy distinta a como lo hace ahora.

in a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an "economic interest" in the continued role of women as "the provider of children for the state" and the performer of household chores without pay.